Julie Kaiser: A summer of sibling bickering

Sunday

May 31, 2009 at 12:01 AMMay 31, 2009 at 5:14 PM

The thing that concerns me most about this summer is wondering which one of us will actually survive to welcome the first day of school in August. It’s not always this bad in my house, but April and May hit fever pitch in the sibling bickering department.

Julie Kaiser

The thing that concerns me most about this summer is wondering which one of us will actually survive to welcome the first day of school in August.

It’s not always this bad in my house, but April and May hit fever pitch in the sibling bickering department. If our household appeared on a reality show such as “Survivor,” we would drive ratings skyward with our drama.

Welcome our three main characters: a beautiful screamer, a sassy whiner and a desperate schemer.

My recent preschool graduate plays the screamer; my 8-year-old takes whining to an art form; and I’m the schemer … constantly scheming how to vote myself off my own island.

My children do in many ways resemble tropical bloodthirsty fish, according to Anthony E. Wolf, Ph.D., who authored the book “Mom, Jason’s Breathing On Me! The Solution to Sibling Bickering.”

“It is this inevitable and insatiable pigginess for parent that dominates any situation in which siblings bicker and a parent chooses to get involved,” Wolf writes. “Picture baby piranhas fighting over an uninteresting scrap; then a peacemaker enters the scene — who also happens to be the biggest, most delicious piece of meat that ever was. In regard to sibling bickering, where a parent is at all part of the equation, just that fact invariably brings out in children the part of them that is not looking for solutions at all, but wants all of you.”

He recommends three steps for breaking the feeding frenzy of sibling bickering:

- Don’t take sides.

- Act quickly (or not at all).

- Don’t listen — unless there is potential for great harm to one or the other child.

Perhaps you wonder about the words “great harm.” So did I. Great harm on my island takes a variety of forms. At worst, we have hitting, kicking, pushing, shoving, pinching and occasional hair pulling or spitting.

My two children don’t normally resort to the “great harm” level until after the verbal taunting concludes. Sometimes the fisticuffs enter the argument ahead of the screaming and whining, but please believe me when I say there is ALWAYS screaming and whining.

So I try not to take sides, which is actually pretty easy when you can’t stand either piranha at the moment. I try to ignore the situation and not listen to their petty arguments. And when “great harm” ensues, I move in carefully to separate them and then to inflict swift and just consequences.

In an ideal world, I would send them to their rooms and leave them there for days. Occasionally, however, my children do not stay in their rooms upon demand. They dart out and find each other to finish what they started.

That’s when I resort to my least flattering version of “swift and just consequences,” which simply means I stand there and scream and whine louder than anyone else.

If I resort to a really good impression of a “Mom Gone Bad,” the most amazing thing happens — something rarely mentioned in the parenting guides or on “Super Nanny.”

My children look at me with wide eyes and run away together to hide. They bond over their mutual fear of my outburst, and their prior arguments float away.

As effective as this method can be, it does lead to a pounding headache and an eventual apology to my two brawlers. I then dust off my own parents’ stern, oft-used lecture about how we can’t yell, scream, push, shove or treat each other rudely.

How did they survive summer with eight of us kids anyhow?

State Journal-Register contributor Julie Kaiser is a freelance writer and columnist living in Chatham, Ill.